CAPITOL IDEAS: After the Flood
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS TOM BETHELL After the Flood Reflections on New Orleans from a former resident. HURRICANE KATRINA made one thing clear: the federal government has devolved into an all-purpose caring...
...Soon, he became little more than a straw in the political winds...
...The weather had discriminated against them...
...Legislators are praised for their generosity when they vote to spend other people's money but are reproached for meanness when they decline to take that easy path...
...To state the obvious, they were taking advantage of the breakdown in law and order...
...A voter is, pro tem, an officer of the state and should have to pass a civics test before being registered to vote...
...Needy people down here are being neglected by the President of the United States...
...Until it does the Court will continue to go its way...
...They needed new sneakers because their old ones were soaking wet...
...A second reform would involve returning to an earlier time when the franchise was restricted...
...Voting is not a human right...
...President Bush has presided over the nationalization of airport security screeners, the creation of the Homeland Security bureaucracy, the largest expansion of Medicare since President Johnson signed it into law and a 20 percent increase in all federal spending, adjusted for inflation, even before the cost of responding to Hurricane Katrina...
...That's not going to happen either, but it should be discussed...
...All the incentives work in the same direction—to encourage "yea" votes on spending bills...
...At some point, someone in a position of leadership is going to have to say out loud, in response to whatever new crisis has been trumped up: solving it isn't the job of the federal government...
...But there was no shortage of excuses on their behalf...
...It would solve the fundamental problem: the absence of ratio or proportion between the amount a legislator spends and what his constituents would be "charged...
...Legislators can "drill for dollars" even when the pool is empty, passing out to recipient classes money greatly in excess of the revenues collected...
...There were two hurricanes...
...Learn to swim, or sink beneath the waves...
...They resemble a pool of oil underneath a number of surface owners, any or all of whom may drill for oil without restriction...
...David Wessell wrote in the Wall Street Journal...
...Where's the care...
...To make amends he would have to unloose another flood—of money...
...Not all Republicans believe in ever-increasing government, of course, and possibly one or two Democrats don't either...
...Tom Bethell is a senior editor of The American Spectator...
...ONE SOLUTION WOULD BE to add up the dollars that each legislator votes to spend, and to "bill" the taxpayers in his district accordingly...
...He has prided himself on being compassionate, so this was a painful moment for him...
...Betsy, in 1965, was a direct hit...
...Early in his first term, when Bush greatly increased the tax flows to government schools, it was uncomfortably clear that he assumed that if children were being "left behind," an insufficiency of tax monies was the reason...
...Where are the first,second, and third responders...
...In the case of federal spending, the only requirement is that 50 percent of the legislators sign on for any given siphoning operation...
...Bush had waited too long—a full 48 hours—before showing that he cared...
...URRICANE KATRINA made one thing clear: the federal government has devolved into an all-purpose caring agency with no limit to its role...
...George Bush and Ted Kennedy are in broad agreement...
...No one else can do it for you...
...In England, Tony Blair has in many ways tried to preserve the Thatcher reforms and he understands that socialism is an economic disaster...
...An unapologetic response is what we want to hear...
...Just to fantasize, wouldn't it be great if just once in our lives we saw the President get up on his hind legs and say: "Take responsibility for your own lives...
...Not all Republicans believe in ever-increasing government, of course, and possibly one or two Demo52 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2005/JANUARY 2006 TOM BETHELL crats don't either...
...Why do they believe in government so much...
...That's equivalent to 4 million new government jobs in the U.S...
...On Capitol Hill, the problem is actually worse than that because there is no requirement that there be anything left in the reservoir...
...The prudent or thrifty legislator who refuses to participate—votes "no" on a new spending measure—merely leaves the untapped goodies to be soaked up by others with fewer qualms...
...Hullo-o...
...Big spenders are therefore rewarded and the frugal are penalized...
...But they are real checks...
...Federal revenues when they reach Washington are what economists call a "common-pool resource...
...Get offyour butts...
...Politically, for four decades, the country has been on a path of decline...
...Even if a large number of Republicans had opposed new spending post-Katrina, Democrats would easily have found sufficient waverers to reach a majority and Republicans as a whole would have been demonized as the Uncaring Party...
...Job descriptions are written, workers are hired, a payroll established, civil service regulations applied, and then at the end of the month checks are dished out...
...DECEMBER 2005/JANUARY 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 53...
...Paper jobs are created...
...They don't bounce...
...As far as the economy is concerned, it's like driving a car with the brakes on...
...I arrived in this country with no money in my pocket, moved to New Orleans, and lived there for a number of years...
...The bias toward spending arises because all voters (in the same tax bracket) are charged at the same rate, no matter who represents them in Congress...
...The Constitution, specifying and restricting the federal government's powers, is a dead letter...
...The drag gradually undermines previous reforms...
...If this idea were to be enacted, which of course it won't be, spending would collapse overnight...
...Deficit spending is unrestricted...
...Katrina started out with images of the liberals' preferred victim class engaged in unprovoked smash-and-grab raids on Canal Street in New Orleans...
...But it was the liberals who turned the tables...
...The system has a built-in bias toward profligacy...
...Then, sensing the weakness of his position, the liberals started howling for tax increases...
...Anyone at home at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue...
...Why does President Bush...
...Liberals ought to be jubilant because their philosophy—more government as the solution to all ills—is accepted de facto by both major parties...
...Harriet Miers vowed to "strictly apply the laws and the Constitution," but the Court has made it clear that the Constitution means whatever five justices at any given time say it means, and Congress has not objected to that presumption...
...Get the bums off the public payroll...
...The problem lies in the structure of government itself once shorn of constitutional checks...
...We need leaders with the courage to assume that there is untapped support for common-sense positions that are rarely or never articulated for fear of offending progressive opinion...
...In a better-ordered world, the big spenders would be condemned as irresponsible opportunists, not praised as generous and compassionate...
...When government departs from its traditional task of defending life, liberty, and property, and assumes responsibility for things that individuals can (and must) perform for themselves, it functions only in make-believe fashion...
...Today, any and every crisis demands the same response: more spending...
...Not to mention his faith in more money as the all-purpose lubricant for government schools...
...Yet his government has added more than 800,000 employees to the public payroll since 1997, "their salaries and pensions almost all paid for through taxes," as the London Spectator reported recently...
...The drift continues in the opposite direction—most recently a push to declare that convicted felons are qualified, for example, or even to allow current prisoners to vote (rather too obviously designed to increase the Democratic rolls...
...I never took the view that Americans are entitled to reach into taxpayers' pockets because their income has fallen below a certain level, yet that presumption is now widespread...
...When order has been restored in New Orleans I'll contact a few of my liberal friends still living in the city and I'll report back here if they have anything interesting to say...
...Time for more government...
...They were hungry...
...Soon enough the supposed victims wanted to know: Where are the programs...
...Where are the people who look after us, tell us where to go, provide us with transportation, blankets, bedding, shelter, hot meals, diaper-changing service, medication, crisis counseling...
...Most voters don't understand these things, one reason being the systematic misrepresentation of the issues on television...
...Oh, the howling that would ensue—the howling and the cheering...
Vol. 38 • December 2005 • No. 10
